Some historical punctuation proposals:
- 1668: John Wilkins, in his famous An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, proposed using an inverted exclamation mark () to punctuate ironic statements.
- 1841: Marcellin Jobard, a Belgian newspaper publisher, introduced an irony mark in the shape of an oversized arrow head with small stem (rather like an ideogram of a Christmas Tree) and used in various orientations (on its side, upside down, etc.) to mark ?a point of irritation, an indignation point, a point of hesitation.
- 1899: The irony point () was proposed by the French poet Alcanter de Brahm (alias Marcel Bernhardt) in his 1899 book L'ostensoir des ironies to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level (irony, sarcasm, etc.)
- 1966: Herv Bazin, in his 1966 essay Plumons l'Oiseau (?Let's pluck the bird), used the Greek letter with a dot below for the same purpose (
) in the same work, he proposed five other innovative punctuation marks: the ?doubt point (
), ?conviction point (
), ?acclamation point (
), ?authority point (
), and ?love point (
)
- 1900s: Tom Driberg recommended that ironic statements should be printed in italics that lean the other way to conventional italics.
- 2007: the Dutch foundation CPNB (Collectieve Propaganda van het Nederlandse Boek) presented another design of an irony mark, the ironieteken: (
)
Until then there's always</sarcasm>